[Updated 8/9/11, 7:20 am. See below.] ServiceNow co-founder Fred Luddy told me in January that the San Diego-based provider of Web-based IT management services was on a fast-growth track, and he saw a “clear path” to $1 billion in annual revenue. I wouldn’t say it looked clear to me then, but the company’s trajectory is becoming more apparent today.
ServiceNow, which has been on a hiring binge, says it is opening a new office in San Jose—calling it the company’s “long overdue debut” in Silicon Valley—and the opportunity to tap into the Bay Area’s deep bench in cloud computing.
Founded in 2003 (when it was known as Service-Now, with a hyphen) ServiceNow went cash flow positive in 2007 on annual revenue of $13 million. Luddy told me the company had 275 employees in January. The headcount was 310 three months later, when ServiceNow named former Data Domain CEO Frank Slootman to head the company.
In announcing the opening of its first Silicon Valley office, Slootman says ServiceNow has hired 130 new employees in the past 90 days. The company’s global headcount is now a little more than 400 employees, and that number is expected to grow to more than 500 by the end of September.
The company also named Moti Eliav as vice president of platform development. He will be based in the new San Jose office (in the Metro Plaza business park), and plans to triple the size of ServiceNow’s platform development team in the next year. Slootman describes the new San Jose office as “a kind of mini-hub to San Diego,” which will include Eliav’s team, sales, and operations staffers. By the end of the year, he expects ServiceNow will employ more than 50 people in San Jose.
Slootman, now in his fourth month as ServiceNow’s CEO, tells me that a fast-growth business can’t grow piecemeal. Sounding a bit like Bobby Allison at Daytona, Slootman suggested the company hadn’t “stepped on
